Willems Patrick

Postdoctoral fellow @ Oxidative Stress Signalling

Patrick Willems obtained his master degree at Ghent University after plant studying cold stress signaling in plants during six months in the Vaughan Hurry lab in Umeå (Sweden). Afterwards, he continued studying plant abiotic stress signaling during his PhD in the oxidative stress signaling group of Frank Van Breusegem in collaboration with the proteomics group of Kris Gevaert. This led to multiple first-author papers and several co-authorships, mostly entailing integrative –OMICS analysis of transcriptome, proteome or other datasets. As a postdoctoral researcher, he was shortly active in the proteogenomic annotation of microbial species. More recently, he is focusing on studying post-translational modifications (PTMs) in plants. Recently published work on this topic incudes the characterization of S-sulfenylation at a site-specific level in Arabidopsis and the development of an integrative plant PTM database, ‘The Plant PTM Viewer’. The bridging theme in his research is the integration and interpretation of large (multi-)omics data to make new discoveries or help addressing specific biological research questions.

Contact information

Office: Technologiepark 71, 9052 Zwijnaarde, Belgium
Email: patrick.willems@psb.vib-ugent.be
Office Phone: +32(0)93313922

Publications

The ROS wheel: refining ROS transcriptional footprints.
Willems, P., Mhamdi, A., Simon, S., Storme, V., Kerchev, P., Noctor, G., Gevaert, K., Van Breusegem, F.
N-terminal proteomics assisted profiling of the unexplored translation initiation landscape in Arabidopsis thaliana.
Willems, P., Ndah, E., Jonckheere, V., Stael, S., Sticker, A., Martens, L., Van Breusegem, F., Gevaert, K., Van Damme, P.
Damage on plants activates Ca2+-dependent metacaspases for release of immunomodulatory peptides
Hander, T., Fernández-Fernández, ÁD., Kumpf, RP., Willems, P., Schatowitz, H., Rombaut, D., Staes, A., Nolf, J., Pottie, R., Yao, P., Gonçalves, A., Pavie, B., Boller, T., Gevaert, K., Van Breusegem, F., Bartels, S., Stael, S.
The Plant PTM Viewer, a central resource for exploring plant protein modifications.
Willems, P., Horne, A., Van Parys, T., Goormachtig, S., De Smet, I., Botzki, A., Van Breusegem, F., Gevaert, K.
Mining for protein S-sulfenylation in Arabidopsis uncovers redox-sensitive sites.
Huang, J., Willems, P., Wei, B., Tian, C., Ferreira, R., Bodra, N., Martinez Gache, S.A., Wahni, K., Liu, K., Vertommen, D., Gevaert, K., Carroll, KS., Van Montagu, M., Yang, J., Van Breusegem, F., Messens, J.